http://valleywag.com/379475/jimmy-wales-ed...wikipedia-entry

Dunno about Fox News, but it looks like there is a job for Mr Shankbone a getting the "unusually shaped vegetables" images up to standard.

From the article above:
At issue was the photo used on Allison's page, which she deemed unflattering. "I have contacted her to ask for a photo, so we should have that sorted pretty soon," he wrote in January. All business, of course; why would Wales have any personal interest in sorting through photos of Allison? But let's say he was hoping to win Allison's affections too, in exchange for his services on Wikipedia. This at the same time as he wooed Marsden? If so, one can only gawp admiringly at Wales's ability to multitask.

"BLP's been good to me so far....!"

Really, how much worse and more corrupt can this possibly get?

Read the comments section. For each of these Valleywag stories Rachel Marsden (or someone who claims to be her and sounds a lot like her) actually takes the fight straight to Wikipedia. Often using lines similar to those on this site.

She's there in the comments on every story, lambasting the place.

This time round, some Wiki cultist shoots back:



What new policy? From what I've seen, any attempts to improve the situation have been drowned by juveniles offering endless feeble arguments.

Rachel has gone in with a Gatling gun.

Good to see this observation gaining some currency - the pretense that the internet needs some specific website to become "an encyclopedia" completely misses the point of having an internet in the first place.

Now this is just a mean edit.

Jimbo should do a better job protecting the leg descriptions of his girlfriends.

Greg

What a creep!

He seems to know that region of Pennsylvania v well.

Sechs Acht und Vierzig means "Forty Six and Eight" but to my English-reading eyes and ears, it sounds like "Sex Act and [something kinky].

Actually, it's not quite true. I've added plenty of stuff from (reliable!) printed sources that I don't think are online. Also, if Wikipedia works properly (and I do say if), it filters out the rubbish.

Does Greg mean 6 48, or possibly 68 and 40 - I only did a term at night school - eine tische für zwei, dort in der ecke comes to mind - not much use for Wikipedia, but I do suspect there is something amiss with his counting.

Oh, it strikes me you are the sort of person who watches 'Allo 'Allo and Are You Being Served on PBS far too much

I'm rambling - it's dental distraction (I didn't know the dentist's price list went up to Extra Large on the fillings).

The thing about a filter is this: If it has a little hole in it, you get a high pressure stream of detritus coming through the hole.

I'd agree that there is the potential for a useful function and we are being rather blinkered if we deny that in the best of Wikipedia, that function works. If you really do it properly, then there are lots of sources that are not available online (though I have been impressed with the reach of Google Books into dusty tomes of even my local area). However, a heap of books is just data, someone needs to turn it into information.

Agree to a point. Three are at least 3 things a good encyclopedia should do.

1. Separate the verifiable from the not. I think WP quite good at this.

2. From the list of 10,000 verifiable things, select the 50 or so that are at the right level of granularity for an encyclopedia. Given that you have 5 pages on St Thomas Aquinas, and given the 1,000's of pages of verifiable material on him, which of these go into the article? WP is pretty terrible at that. It mixes obscure things that only scholars would be interested in, with tabloid material. It can always be relied upon to speculate, of course, whether someone was homosexual or paedophile. There was a huge row a few years back when my friend and collaborator Alexis Bugnolo of the Francescan Archive objected to something they wrote about St Anselm. It was claimed that Anselm was gay, and Alexis objected that he couldn't have been, because he was a saint.

3. Of those 50 facts, it must put them in the right order, and connect them in some kind of pleasing order for the reader. E.g. which 5 facts about St Thomas do you put in the introduction, how do you organise the rest. WP is famously bad at this also. Reads like the stuff my children do for their homework, most of the time.

[edit] actually the Bugnolo thing was such good value I enclose a link to my blog post about it here

http://ocham.blogspot.com/2006/02/truth-in-hell_14.html

which has some good quotes. Unfortunately I linked to the current version of the Anselm page, not the historical, but you can find it using the date. And I quote Alexis in full.

Apparently, he knew too much about calendars and about wiki-linking, too!

It's fun to watch Jimbo helping his girlfriends' reputations look better on Wikipedia.

I read that as "You Cheese the News"

Oops! I posted about this in the blog forum. I've got to run but if another mod wants to delete it that's fine with me!

/me shuffles off embarassed

There's nothing new. Courtesy deletion per subject's request (unless they were dead-tree famous) was proposed a long time ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BLP_courtesy_deletion
And it was canned, leaving a comment on the page:

The Wikipedia community has rejected this proposal. A rejected proposal is any for which consensus to support is not present and seems unlikely to form, regardless of whether there is active discussion or not.

Did you get that, oh Wiki Cultist? You can bloviate all you like on a blog, but we can all read wikipedia policy, too, and it's not at all what you claim it is.